


because i would say anything to get what i want! (and i want you to like me)

by voltaires



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, disjointed & generally bad writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-07 04:46:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14663616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voltaires/pseuds/voltaires
Summary: The river in Cokeworth is flooded with the dark bile of factory sludge. It’s an industrial town: the slick runs in her veins and clouds her vision black. James does not have this; she has never known somebody so confident in their upbringing, whose childhood had suffered no more than a scraped knee from exploring their backyard, or the low bump of an anthill.





	because i would say anything to get what i want! (and i want you to like me)

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday to my favorite gal. i love you to the moon and back. i’m sorry there’s no real story & it’s so short, but i hope you enjoy some good old fashioned jily. chicken noodle soup for the soul.

It is by her expectations that when the two of them actually spend time together that is longer than the distance between classes, and more intimate than the paper planes he had once bewitched to circle her head in Charms, it would be by the skin of her teeth;  _kicking and screaming_ was the image her fifteen-year-old mind had conjured up at the hands of social norms which insisted that she was required to relish the attention he directed at her. These were the rules set forth by romance glossies which Petunia had devoured in the yawn of her adolescence, and which Lily had stolen to understand their appeal.   
  
She never did.  
  
What actually happens is this: Lily is seventeen, and she is entranced by the gentle slope of his shoulders, the subtle bump in his nose from where it had been broken against a Bludger and healed improperly, the crumple of his forehead when he laughs. They are sitting across from each other in the Gryffindor common room, scrambling to finish - or, more accurately,  _begin_ \- an assignment for McGonagall that had been neglected for the interest of newspapers which Lily had used to line the bottom of her trunk; so she wouldn’t have to  _scrub_ it when she went back home, she said, and they had spent the hollow Sunday afternoon poring over faded comic-strips. Lily zeroes in on the way James holds his tongue between his teeth while he writes, and she is overwhelmed with the desire to stick her head beneath one of the stiff couch cushions, the way an ostrich would in the sand, and smile so wide that it splits her face.   
  
“I can’t even tell if I’m writing in English anymore,” says James, squinting at his parchment; he glances up, catches her eye, and grins. Lopsided. The candlelight glints on the lenses of his glasses; she never paid attention to what color his eyes were behind them. The murky gold of beer, maybe. “Oh, well. I’m like - McGonagall has taken enough from me already, why not take my soul, too, you know?”   
  
“No,” says Lily, because the words had been the soft drone of white noise: the wind in the trees and the way their branches scraped her window in Cokeworth. Her quill hovers over her own work; a drop of ink wavers from its tip, ready to blotch  _principle_ , and James begins to say something else, the head end of which is,  _Well, I mean_ , and Lily interrupts, “Do you want to go somewhere?”   
  
James pauses. Reasonable. She does not remember him that way. Something must have changed, between the unnamed but well-recalled  _then_  and the fleeting  _now_ , something in the way that Sirius spiked and James mellowed to match. He struggles to find the correct response, visibly scanning his civil rolodex, and settles on, “It’s nearly one in the morning.  
  
The river in Cokeworth is flooded with the dark bile of factory sludge. It’s an industrial town: the slick runs in her veins and clouds her vision black. James does not have this; she has never known somebody so confident in their upbringing, whose childhood had suffered no more than a scraped knee from exploring their backyard, or the low bump of an anthill. Sunbeams are the only thing polluting the rivers of Ilkley. His blood must be lion-red.

Lily quirks her right shoulder up, twists her mouth in a way that she hopes reads  _endearingly cheeky._ Too late, she realizes she must look mulish - she never knows what to do with her eyebrows, and she hasn’t yet mastered the practice of raising one and lowering the other, so the effect is one of anticipation toward pushing him off of the ledge first, rather than jumping and hoping he will follow.

“Where are we going?” says James, with what is less  _laugh_ and more  _violent exhalation from the nose_. Relief washes over her. James is a champion of ignoring what is right in front of him. It should bother her, but it’s a welcomed interruption from the constant frequency of her over-analysis.

If a horse is presented with two identical bales of hay, each an equal distance from where it stands, it will starve to death because of its inability to choose between them. Lily had felt like that for a stretch of her time at Hogwarts, except she was already starving, and the bales of hay were two terrible outcomes. She felt  _responsible_ for Severus, while her circle of friends expanded and his dwindled; she couldn’t fathom the idea of abandoning him, not even when they had gone at each other’s throats, claws extended, itching for blood. She knew how to punch a hole through drywall, and then, once the dust had settled, patch it up.

That was  _then_. Inconsequential. Bygones, and that.

James sweeps loose jelly-beans into the inner left pocket of his robes; Lily places their three remaining toffees, still nestled in their cellophane, in hers. They don’t make it far: just to the corridor where the castle’s stifling air gives way to a swift breeze. James says something about  _I’ll fail_   _Transfiguration_  and  _It’s not the first time I’ve let McGonagall down_ , tongue in cheek, but with a cadence that suggests that he genuinely doesn’t  _know_  that he’s her favorite student.  That, too, had frustrated the fifteen-year-old Lily, as she wondered how James could manage to be effortlessly skilled at the subject, while she struggled through spells for which she saw no practical use. She’s sure that James knows that teachers are fond enough of him, if not outright; that nearly  _everybody_ is, inexplicably, influenced by his tactlessness; that he can charm any adult with an impish grin and a brief yet animated anecdote. Even his sticky silence is winning.

He leans over the marble expanse of the railing and glances up at the stars erratically dispersed across the navy sky. Lily worries her bottom lip between her teeth, following his gaze; she can’t tell which star he is looking at and, fleetingly, wishes he would take her hand and point out a constellation to her, though she probably knows more about astronomy than he does; he had thought the class to be a great waste of time and more appropriately spent as an hour he and Sirius would spend with their heads ducked behind a telescope while Professor Sinistra pretended that the low hiss of their whispers was a mosquito that nobody could seem to catch.

“Do you remember,” says James, his lips thinned in a suppressed smile, seamlessly hijacking her train of thought, “when I cut Sirius’s hair in the library? In fifth year?”

“No,” says Lily. She just remembers that Sirius had arrived late to History with mauve circles beneath his eyes and a bad chop. She had assumed that it was something to do with his family; the impression of the Blacks that she got, and stuck with, was one of cold withdrawal, and she imagined the story like this: Mother Black says, Sirius, your father and I are _exhausted_ by your behavior and you must at least  _look_  presentable or there will be consequences, mister, to which Sirius caves, though he is not typically one for caving, and gives himself an impromptu poor-man’s taper. She had seen the nape of his neck for the first time in two years.

“Pretend you do, then,” says James. He is vibrating with pent-up energy; it’s expulsed in the rhythmless way his fingers dance across the marble. “It was funny, when it happened. Regulus gets a letter from Mrs. Black, and she’s all,  _Tell Sirius that Aunt Something-or-Other_ - some ancient relative, I don’t remember which one - _visited for tea and saw a photograph and she thinks he looks very_ royal _with long hair_. And Mrs. Black is like,  _I quite_ prefer  _his hair long_ , after ragging on him for _ever_  for looking ‘unkempt.’ And Regulus tells Sirius, and Sirius is  _livid_ , and he makes me cut his hair  _right there_. Right where we were standing. Pince gave us detention. Regulus, too. Talk about shooting the messenger. We had to catalogue books for, like, three hours.”

He chuckles a little, mostly dead air, and the wind sweeps the sound away. It doesn’t seem to be that funny to James, but it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself that it is, so Lily laughs a little too loud and James looks at her and laughs and then they are doubled over like it is the funniest thing in the world, both forcing the sound from their lungs - machine-gun, screaming and wheezing - until it sounds like foreshadowing. An owl hoots from somewhere in the trees and the foreign voice subsides their raucousness into disjointed giggles; James, red in the face, removes his glasses, wipes his eyes, and sighs. “It’s fucked up, isn’t it?”

She’s not sure if he means the story, the action, the punishment, or Sirius himself, but she agrees. The white light of the moon combats his flushed cheeks and Lily knows that she is equally aglow because the heat is radiating off of her in waves; she is red to the ears. James sways for the second that they are standing still and she is not sure who moves first but their lips connect, awkward and tentative, and it is  _so_ weird, because James’s hands are hanging at his sides, not touching her, and Lily’s hands are clenched together, so they are joined in the most chaste manner possible, and it is so _weird_. But it is  _good_ in the way that it flushes the industrial muck from Lily’s brain and leaves her clear-headed and reeling, until James steps back and presses the heel of his hand to his temple.

“I’m sorry,” is all he says; he does not  _sound_ very sorry, nor does he look it. He seems quite right with himself; his ignorance of astronomy seems to have equipped him with an affinity for practical divination. The sky is blue, two plus two is four, James likes Lily. Peculiarly, and despite a breadth of evidence to suggest the contrary, Lily likes James. It is a simple and absolute fact of nature.

“You’re not,” says Lily; she is not looking at him, but at the broad stretch of heath before them; if she stepped off of the ledge and fell into the dry grass below, it would go up in a blaze.

“Are you?”

She is not in love with him; she doesn’t think she knows what that means yet, and she would loathe to leap to conclusions. It is a possibility for the  _potential_  to be in love him, though - and, yes, of course she  _loves_ him, but she loves her  _toad_  as well. It is a start, is what she means, and the limitless infatuation of  _right now_ is as generous as the ocean, though she has never seen it. She is afraid to look at him: the thought that she may be  _stuck_  looking at him, unable to turn away, terrifies her; the idea that she is privy to the secrecy of the witching hour and she may be too captivated by James to notice it.  _That_ is being in love.

“Why would I be?” she says, and quits the pretense.


End file.
